When it comes to low-rise pants, especially unforgiving denim, I thought the only issue had to do with how comfortable you are with butt cleavage. Now, I’ve discovered that there are biomechanical perils to consider.

Our chiropractor friend Todd Hackney of O’Fallon, Ill. says that tight fitting low-rise pants can actually affect your pelvis. As you struggle to keep them pulled up, the pants respond by pulling down on your hip bones. That can subtly throw your gait and posture out of wack. There’s little scientific evidence because the phenomenon of the low-rise is fairly new, but Hackney says that if you feel funny in the pants, it’s probably because your body’s doing something unnatural to compensate.
After a while it doesn’t feel “funny” anymore, but your body is still compensating.

And men who insist on wearing pants so low that underwear is no longer secret have a whole other problem to consider. The waddle , pelvis thrusting, shimmy walk that they have to adopt just looks wrong and one day their bodies will retaliate.

So does that mean that you have to throw out the low-low-rise? That’s for you to decide. Maybe you should just opt not to wear them everyday or make a mental note of how your body reacts to wearing them. That might make the decision for you. But then again we’ve done worse things for fashion. I know, I have. There’s a statistic that wearing 4-inch heels can exert a force of more than 4 times your body weight per square inch on the ball of your foot. You do the math. But still I bought a new pair yesterday.